Best Hydroponics Startups

In heavily populated urban areas, people grow their food wherever they can. In areas where space is taken up by residences and businesses, individuals are forced to come up with unique ways of getting fresh produce. Whether it is growing on their balconies and rooftops, movable and stackable containers or just buying fresh produce from urban farms, hydroponics is taking the next step in bringing fresh food to our tables. On a micro-level these systems can feed our families, but on a global level, they could end up feeding and saving entire cities!

Weekend fun time!

Miyagi, Japan

In 2014, Shigeharu Shimamura, a plant physiologist and CEO of Mirai, constructed one of the world’s largest all-LED indoor farms—25,000 square feet of futuristic garden beds nurtured by 17,500 LED lights in a bacteria-free, pesticide-free environment. After just 12 months of operation, Mirai was producing an astonishing 10,000 heads of lettuce per day! It is so efficient that productivity per square foot is 100x greater and uses 99% less water than a conventional farm. Lettuce grown outdo...

Spread, a hydroponic produce company in Kyoto, Japan, is building the world’s first fully automated indoor farm in the world, dubbed the “Vegetable Factory”. Launching in fall of 2017, this farmerless farm will be soil-less and sunless, and will use robotics, LEDs, and hydroponics to produce 30,000 heads of lettuce per day.
Their existing hydroponic indoor farming facility located in Kameoka, Kyoto produces 21,000 heads of lettuce per day. The “Vegetable Factory”...

United Kingdom

Zero Carbon Food is a commercial venture that aims to benefit Londoners, businesses, society and the environment as a whole. Utilising underground redundant spaces, we will be producing leafy greens, herbs and micro-greens. These would be grown using LED lights and a hydroponics system with all produce for sale within the M25.
The immediate benefit for Londoners is reduced food waste through increased shelf-life, bringing employment to inner cities and helping to achieve the reduction in the...

New York, New York

BrightFarms finances, designs, builds and operates greenhouse farms at or near supermarkets, cutting time, distance, and cost from the produce supply chain.
The inspiration for BrightFarms grew out of our desire to grow food in the same communities where it’s consumed—a desire to grow food that’s fresher, tastier, and better for the environment. The team at BrightFarms has been working in urban agriculture since 2006. Since 2011, we’ve been on a quest to bring commercial scale urban ...

Surrey, Canada

Urban Cultivator is a hydroponics company based in Surrey, British Columbia that creates indoor gardening appliances, which can grow herbs, microgreens, vegetables, and flowers for residences and commercial kitchens.
Urban Cultivator is an enclosed hydroponic system designed for continuously growing herbs and smaller vegetables indoors. An integrated computer controls watering and light cycles, and also activates built-in fans to maintain proper humidity and air circulation. Users are requir...

Green Sense Farms leases a 30,000-square foot warehouse in a centrally located industrial park, which can serve a 5-state Midwestern region. It has built two climatecontrolled grow rooms, each equipped with seven 12-meter tall grow towers and 7,000 Philips GreenPower LED production modules. The cool burning lights require less climate control and use less energy, so they can be placed closer to the plants, allowing for more levels to be stacked. For Green Sense Farms this resulted in a cost s...